As the leaves begin to turn, I’m finally taking a break from a frenetic summer and early fall of speaking. After wrapping up the spring with trips to Bangkok and Zurich (where I met the team behind the phenomenal Projket Interim) I’ve stuck closer to home — or at least to North America. A few highlights:

• Most recently, I was in Chicago for the Big Ideas Summit hosted by Procurious, a British social network for procurement professional (the people who run the world’s supply chains). My talk — the very short version of which is posted above — focused on “engineering serendipity,” and both unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. (I gave a similar talk earlier in the month to the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada in forest fire-choked British Columbia.)

• The week before that I was in Denver, then Victoria (British Columbia) speaking about the future of cities. In the case of the former, I was the opening keynote for this year’s RE/MAX Commercial Symposium, where I used Amazon’s HQ2 RFP as a prism to examine how cities and CRE prefernaces are changing. The next day in Victoria, I spoke at the inaugural Platform retreat hosted by the American Society of Interior Designers about how new mobility options, shared workspaces, and networks are transforming cities.

• In August, I moderated back-to-back events in San Francisco for Intel and Ford, both focused on the future of mobility. The former hosted an intimate press event to discuss its “Passenger Economy” report on the $7 trillion economic impact from autonomous vehicles by 2050, while Ford invited more than a thousand people to Fort Mason for its “City of Tomorrow Symposium.” As seen above, I was invited to moderate a panel on mobility-as-a-service, and how we go about actually building such a system. (Also on the mobility beat: in September I spoke the Columbus Partnership as part of their efforts to implement the Smart Columbus plan, which won the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge.)

• But the highlight of the summer were back-to-back appearances in Colorado Springs and Albuquerque in late August. The first was for a brief talk to the senior leadership of Deloitte’s Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice on how we might rethink the idea of what a “smart city” is. For example, rather than through solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall into your suburban home, what if we could convince institutional investors to build thousands upon thousands of Alejandro Aravena’s “half-built” homes in exchange for a 50-year on the solar electricity collected from their rooftops?

From there, I drove to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico for an unclassified, but off-the-record workshop on the world in 2035. I can’t divulge many details until the final report is published, but it was exhilarating to spend the day in the presence of so many brilliant people trying to invent the future. More soon, I hope.

• The rest of the fall is a bit quiet, with one great exception. Next month, I head to Los Angeles for the inaugural edition of LA CoMotion — a five-day festival of new mobility in the Arts District downtown. As director of strategy, my job is make sure the whole is greater than the sum of its many very cool parts. With only five weeks to go until Nov. 15-19, we’re in the home stretch. You can get a taste of what I’m thinking in the video below. See you on the other side.

Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation — where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative — and the director of strategy for LACoMotion, a new mobility festival coming to the Arts District of Los Angeles in November 2017.